La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la

— Georges Moustaki, “La Philosophie”

when the swans and geese have sunk under the pink lakes of the South,
when this chair is up in final smoke, and I have not yet said it,
you and I, we will still be trying to say it in other ways,
which is, finally, the best way, like saying Amaryllis,
when you don’t mean that gorgeous hunk of fragile flower,
but mean an old girl sitting in the fertile rain, humming to death.

— Brad Gooch, “H.”

la

Sitting on a beach in Normandy earlier this month, I admired the seagulls riding various plumes of wind. It was too windy and cold to swim, which left me with words and thoughts and the realization (once again) that the waves of science are jammed by the presence of angels and metaphysical Others.

I say “once again” because I touched on this in a poem titled “The First Gust of Special Relativity is Weightlessness” (published in My Heresies). Susanna Lang was right: the poet could not stop seeing what the scientist might have seen when imagining the theory of gravity.

la la

Although raised in a secular home, the young Albert Einstein attended Catholic school, and he felt aesthetically implicated in its devotions until the age of twelve when he renounced religion completely. He later wrote of losing the “religious paradise of youth,” and transformed the epiphany into a universalism, a call to be a priest in the cathedral of science, or— in his own phrasing – “a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the merely personal, from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.”

Losing his religion made it possible to be seduced by physics, science, the realm of ineffable questions. Einstein referred to this movement from religion to science as “being in flight from the I and the we to the it” . . . But there is an aporia here— a gap between the universalist aspiration of theory and the attraction between individual bodies. Einstein corresponded with his maternal first cousin, Elsa. In one such letter, he framed his relationship to his wife, Mileva, as a business enterprise. “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire,” he wrote. “I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her.”

Addressed to a lover, Einstein’s letter had implications for the woman who would later become his second wife. He tells his mistress what the word “wife” means to him. He gives her a blueprint to the space she might covet. Maybe infidelity is the wrong word for Einstein’s behavior? In a poetic moment, he had claimed that science could be the only love to which he remained faithful. No god or human institution could compete. By locating science at the heart of his life, he set other relationships in its shadow. His second son, Eduard Einstein, died in 1965. At the time of his son’s death, Albert had not seen him in thirty years. Despite his brilliance, he couldn’t find a way to relate to the human who shared his name and lived with schizophrenia.

la la la

With the waters of the English Channel raging around me, I recall being told that schizophrenia runs in families. Medieval priests attributed its hallucinations and delusions to possession by demons. Exorcisms are still offered at various churches in Alabama. Whatever else one believes, it is clear that demons possess the quality of insatiability.

la la la la

Astronomer Arthur Eddington said that Albert Einstein had banished ‘the demon of gravitation’. Although agnostic on demons, Einstein believed that his theory of relativity had successfully scared off the ‘ghosts’ of absolute time and space. But there are other demons and ghosts that his theory was addressing. Take, for instance, the supernal being of science known as “Maxwell’s demon,” a demon who has the capacity to detect the location of all molecules. Physicist James Clerk imagined him in order to test the second law of thermodynamics. Lest this demon be lonely, Louis Filon and Karl Pearson imagined a peer for him. This peer, the “Filon-Pearson demon,” could teleport itself, travel at impossible speeds, and indulge in freaky actions at a distance. Male physicists named their hypothetical demons, and history passes those demons along to us.

la la la la la

Some of these legacies are hallowed by the discursive regimes of “genius,” which S. C. Cornell glossed in “Special People”. Ostensibly a review of Helen Lewis’ The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, Cornell unpacks her argument that “what we call genius depends on the norms of a given period, ‘on what our society values, and what it is prepared to tolerate.’”

If I am not mistaken, Lewis is a staff writer for The Atlantic who has expressed an inability to tolerate trans women, and has repeatedly voiced her trans-exclusionary palaver across platforms and media. It is not clear where she stands on demons. Nevertheless, in the genius discourse as described by Lewis, the Romantic theory competes with the Scientific theory of genius. Where the Romantics “believed that genius was a natural, childlike quality, and that too much education could corrupt an otherwise promising case,” the Scientists sought to establish a hereditary aristocracy of genetics that eschewed notions of “inspiration” and “madness” associated with socially-inferior human beings.

Cornell takes issue with the Romantic conception of inspiration, which harked “perilously near to the voices heard by the insane”—a particular problem for him because insanity appeared also in the “lower races.” As for insanity and losing one’s mind, once upon a time, back in the 1900’s, I went on a date with an economist. He took me to dinner and then to the cinema where we watched A Beautiful Mind. Condemned to my bucket seat, I wept into the lower half of my shirt as the life of John Nash, the Nobel-Prize-winning creator of game theory, proceeded on screen. The economist had no way to game the scenario he’d been given: a date crying during a first date. A time out of mind. A mind out of time.

la la la la la la

John Nash once told a colleague that he took supernal ideas seriously because “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did.” Ultimately, his forced hospitalization for schizophrenia would make Nash ineligible for the genius of Scientists.

What Helen Lewis calls “the deficit model of genius” evokes a subconscious desire to balance out the uniqueness of the gift with an exacting cost. The toils of genius is usually relegated to their partner or caregiver; Cornell lists Vera Nabokov, Sophia Tolstoy, and Alice B. Toklas.

Cornell’s most intriguing contention is figurative: he likens the correspondence and objects genius to relics, quoting a letter that Albert Einstein sent to his wife, Mileva Marić, a few years prior to publishing his theory of general relativity:

You will make sure:
that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room. . . .

You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

You will stop talking to me if I request it.

Cornell adds that this letter was “part of a bundle that sold at a Christie’s auction for almost nine hundred thousand dollars” in 1996. “The demand for the ephemera of genius might be viewed as an update on the medieval crowds who flocked to the (various) churches that claimed to have the foreskin of Christ,” Cornell continues, as “both pursuits satisfy our craving for signs of humanity in a being thought to be divine.”

The Romantic genius has an uninheritable gift, an accident of fate that frees them from committing to the struggles of status in the world. Of course, the Romantic genius dies young: only a handful live past their forties. Like Cornell, I’m galled by our obsession with genius. “A better inoculation against the idea of special people may be simply to abandon the idea of genius and its underlying assumption that, at a certain point, an unusual talent transfigures into something more mystical.” From a beach in Normandy, it is still possible to see that Trump and his crew of white supremacist genetic geniuses are deeply invested in their romance with the Scientist genius, and will make accommodations for any genius or demon who corresponds to the laws of Social Darwinism.

S'ils passent parmi vous, regardez les bien vivre
Et comme eux soyez fou, et comme eux soyez ivre

— Georges Moustaki, ibid.

*

Brad Gooch, “H.”
Georges Moustaki, “La Philosophie”
S. C. Cornell, “Special People” (New Yorker)
Susanna Lang, Review of My Heresies (RHINO Poetry)
My Heresies (Sarabande Books)